Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Working through the process has been a quick, and confusing time. The freedom in this project to me is a bit confusing. (strangely.)...uh, yeah.

Here is my first draft of my typeface layout.
I've chosen the fonts: Caslon, and Frutiger. One represents a women's body, and the other represents a man's body. Through out the mailer I'll point out certain points to why I feel this way, and why they work together well.

These are the two spreads I'm working with right now.

The cover

The continued back side.

First open fold

Second

Third

Forth

fifth

sixth.

They are all a bit confusing on this, but these were basically the spreads I was working with individually.

After Critique it was said that the inside of the fold out was more effective than the outside where all the folding happens. It minimalistic approach seemed to be less crowded and crammed in. So I need to work on eliminating some graphic elements from the other side, and definitely lowering the type size on the copy.

Also, with the beams coming out of their eyes Kidwell suggested doing something unconventional with the basic character set and have them beaming out of their eyes rather than just being static and boring.

Film to Print:
-Simple solution by putting final screen printed piece as a background image for time line
- having another time line with steps and images of screen printing. OR put the images along the "handmade" line.
- Interesting cropping/integration of images while text overlays with squares for legibility issues.

Print to motion:
-Edit in and out of a film documentation of the actual piece.
-Edit in and out stills of the vectored time line from the computer.
-Film printed piece in similar way of the screen-printing piece and have them integrated.

TWO OPTIONS FOR FINAL IDEA:

ONE: Have a separate time line for the screen printing stills for process. I would probably had more space for this line so the piece could still have some white space and be less over whelming.

TWO: FLASHY FLASH. Make a motion piece while weaving in and out of my time line and and showing the imagery of the process, edit it down to essential process parts.

ETHOS: Pedigree Plus wet dog food.
Type: There is a lot of information on this dog food can. The scale of it is good, but the lack of contrast between each fact is hard to read. The reader would have to take time to sit down and read every bit of that can to know exactly what they are getting and how should they serve it to their pet. Also, You don't know where the front and the back are. I'm not sure if this is due to image or type, but I feel like they are both at fault. Although, the Pedigree Plus logo I feel looks trustworthy due to the blue ribbon behind the name, which carries many connotations. Also, the way that they highlight the Healthy immunity is good whine the burgundy circle.
Color: The color is consistent with rest of their products. YELLOW and blue. Even though the blue ribbon can read trustworthy the yellow is a bit over bearing and could use some nice touches of other colors. Or maybe just less yellow and more blue or white. I feel they chose a good dog though for this can because he definitely stands out due to its coloring. If it were to be a blonde dog it would have blended in with the rest of the canvas.
Image: Choice of imagery is obvious. It's dog product, so why don't they have a dog on it. Nothing wrong with that. Also, they show what the food looks like in the can, and what it was made out of before it was processed. Image is not a main thing on this package due to all the typographic information that is needed to show why this can of dog for is good for your dogs immunity.

THE AUDIENCE: I believe that the audience of this product is a dog/pet owner that is concerned with what their dog is eating. Eating wet dog food is known to be a luxury so they also don't mind spending money for quality. Also to have a balanced diet.

LOGOS: Johnson and Johnson Band-Aids
Type: The type on this package is is also a dominant element. It's clear and concise, which is totally obvious and I think smart. When looking for a band-aid you need to be able to see something clear and bold. Which this type does on the cover. The type on the back is small and the user I feel can choose to read this or not due to the simplicity of the box and obvious product. But the reason is is because there is no hierarchy on the back of the box like the front.
Color: the color of the type is bold, but the rest is very calming and plain, this could be due to the being in a slight accident no one wants to see crazy colors to just get them more confused.
Image: Image I feel is half of this packaging, because there is a big band-aid on the front, which tells the user look what is inside me! Even though the band-aid is not percentage wise a dominant image, I still feel it takes up half of this packaging conceptually.

THE AUDIENCE: This consumer of this product is a practical buyer who knows that these band-aids are better than the others to choose from. The audience I believe is everyone.

PATHOS: Wonka Fun Dip
Type: The type on this piece is obviously very playful and loud. There is a lot going on, and the hierarchy is a bit confusing. We know that it's Fun Dip, but the rest of the type is bit confusing due to them all being very similar sizes. Also, the Logo type is almost as dominant as the Product type. The type on the back is expressive and fun. I feel that it's pretty clear about what I'm supposed to read and in order as well.
Color: The colors are really everywhere. Due to it being a three flavor candy it helps that the three colors you get in the package are everywhere, but it is overwhelming and it's hard to read because the balance is too similar across the page. The percentage of the colors are almost equal. It was smart putting the type in white because of all the business with color.
Image: The imagery involved is very small, unless could fizzy little circles as imagery. But they do use the fruit to show what flavor each package contains. Even though it's not real fruit, but they elude to the taste of each one. The expressive swirls and circles show that it's a fun and free type of candy. Also it shows how you're suppose to use the candy but the "lik-a-stix" on the package which is helpful for someone who doesn't know how to eat this candy. On the back it really expresses the "Wonka" feeling with the hat and the swirls as well.

THE AUDIENCE: This product I feel especially appeals to children. A child who enjoys to have a long sugary snack that will last. I'm not sure if appeals to parents because it tends to make quite the mess.

Reading through the readings provided I got a pretty good sense of what Ethos, Pathos and Logos were in relation to image. I've previously learned about these three words of rhetoric, but it was in an Ethics class so looking at it relating to an image is kind of different. Rather and action, I need to look at image and presentation. Although, after reading the readings about all three, going through the grocery store and choosing which goes with which was difficult because I felt there was no 100% right answer.
Logos is persuasion by the use of reasoning.
Ethos refers to the credibility and trust out into something.
and
Pathos is trying to appeal to the viewer by their sympathies and imagination.

Decided on how one could translate these they may always overlap, but it's the way you finally put everything together is how it may rely on how good of a message it is. Such as in the Type and Image reading dealing with the contraints that one designer may have is challenging and it also gives you these boundaries of how far one can go. Such as if one product does have Ethos and Logos it's depending on the imagery you choose to portray which ever one you'd like to make more dominant. Also, by how the cropping and composition is.

The folly poster has been quite the process. Finalizing the project has been a big step in my moving forward with the project as well. On critique day it was discussed that my composition and the way of my pattern layout should be more angular and that also I need more white space so I decided to change that for the evening critique so that they could see more of a finished product.
From this :

To this:

The judges felt that the pattern was arbitrary and that they didn't like how Us five was more dominant than Joe Lovano...
Moving forward though Jamie thought it would be good to bring in some iterations of the pattern at a different scale, because the ads I had shown her were more interesting compositions and thought that it could use a little shake up. So I ended up with this!

Honestly, I'm so indecisive about this poster because I had been working with a certain size for the entire process and so looking at something new and different is hard to judge. Also, it may be that the less information on the page is more interesting to look at when it's at full scale rather than on the screen. While the original looks more interesting at a smaller scale, but not as cool large.

For my final poster my main trope is still Personification with how I handled the cat and how Joe Lovano has a connection to it.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Working through this time with a different communication channel I decided to use text, rather than using audio/music/sound effects. I thought since I hadn't touched enough on the history of my brand in my poster I should revisit it. So, my goal to achieve in this project was to make a time line basing information about different subjects that could possibly relate to my brand identity.

By splitting up three main subjects to focus on I decided to have three different time lines streaming in and out of one another to show visual appeal, but also a different look on the time line. My three different subjects were: Handmade, social craft, and networking. Within the handmade time line I focused on when ways of making textiles came about. Although this one was problematic, Tyler pointed out that why is it called, "handmade" when it all about screen printing. GOOD POINT, and takin'. But, while making this, I felt that putting screen printing on my backdrop would elude to a different idea about what I'm researching. I could be wrong. I also should have added more information if I am going to use the general term, "handmade" to the time line, I think that could have helped it. Within the second category/subject I used social craft and concentrated on when doing craft with a group of people came along. So, my main focus was knitting circles, and quilting bees due to their history.
My third subject was networking, due to how imperative it is to my company. The internet these days is how most people shop, so I wanted to focus on how networking could and has helped the industry.

In critique Tyler mentioned that my type in the background read as a image and not type, and I'm not exactly sure if that was a bad or good thing, or if it was meant to be anything at all...I meant to say something after class, but it slipped my mind. BUT, my reasoning for intertwining them and having them translucent was to show how they can all intersect each other and work as one.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

This reading was fun, and understandable, AND it kept me going, which is hard...for me at least.

BUT! I got a lot of important and insightful information out of it. I was interested in the word, "closure". Throughout the reading I didn't quite understand why they decided to use that word, maybe it is what it means. (hey, I'm making an example of closure! I think...) I thought of it as we just let things be, and don't fully investigate our questions. Which can hinder our thoughts and process but sometimes we just have to let things go and have closure because going to the moon and seeing if the world is round would be impossible for me, right now. But this all has to do with a story/narrative, an idea, and how we begin to think of something, then try and process and figure it out, then let it go.

The next part of the reading was also interesting because different types of transitions which how closure can come about...moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and the last is no sequitur, which has no relationship, a lot of random images. All of these are pretty self explanitory, but within the reading they gave comic books as an obvious reference, which they have the gutter, or the gap which lets the reader make their own assumption of what happens next in their mind, so that they become part of the story.

Here I used some pattern's and textures I recently experimented with in the previous step, I wanted to show more of a masculine feel so I decided to just use one shape, and make it real repetitive to get a keeping a beat. Then getting influenced by constructivism for the type.

Here I wanted to keep angles in mind, and keep them really sharp. Then playing off with text and boxes. This one I felt was the most successful which is what I'm moving forward with.

Working through this iteration has been a bit difficult. Due to the arbitrary pattern design that doesn't have THAT much to do with my band, people started to question what the textures and shapes meant. So, all the explanation that I had is that I did the exercise in being influenced by their music, and free fluid movement of it. BUT! Jamie and I discussed about how design doesn't always have to come from concept. Form can come first, and then a concept can be found in the experiment. I'm not sure why I didn't put this together at first due to our haiku project from last year, but here are some ideas I played with with cat paw prints instead of the circles. I am also going to try making music notes out of the black dots that are round and just a nice shape.

Some color iterations as well.

Here is the same composition, but instead of cat paw prints, they are the same circular shape I printed, but I replaced the circles that the texture had with music notes. I enjoy how this takes up more space rather than the paw prints, but the music notes are a very fine detail so it may be hard to notice, which could be nice too though.

detail shots:

EDIT: Now that I'm going back and taking a good look at my old iteration of this poster I'm wondering if I should have more white space within this recent iteration. And, also if I should keep on overlapping the shapes. I felt the music notes and cat paw prints got lost when I did. And now that they are very important part of the poster I'm wondering if I should keep them separate shapes or overlap.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Throughout this process in applying one communication channel to my detail narrative I learned how to manipulate time, and with maniupulating time, I learned how to be able to focus on certain aspects of a narrative. For my communication channel I chose image, and by this I learned that I had to make the image a good quality and interesting one. Either by angle, color, or motion. Throughout this I really focused on having a lot of detail shots to get the entire idea within the frame so that the viewer could understand what my project was all about.

The way I used narrative throughout this video was to show the process of screen printing, and by this I used time to show certain points off with most of the time having the speed of the video sped up, but with some key elements slowed down so that they could remember what I was doing. Editing the footage had a large part to do with what I know about narrative and how I could tell a story. Cutting down a seven minute video to 40 seconds was also challenging, but watching through the process I figured that a lot of it was useless, because it was very repetitive, and I didn't want it to get boring. As in the idea of a narrative there is a beginning, middle and end...not a beginning and thirty middles, then an end. Therefore that helped a lot when I thought about the video and it's own narrative.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Working through all the glitches within this project I finally have a for sure direction, and I'm ready to get to work on it. I wanted to concentrate on the idea of pointing out what was the main part of each fragmented "sentence" while taking the focus off all the junk and extra wording, such as "and, is, it, that" sort of thing. Here are some compositions I was thinking of.

I'm now planning on going with the first idea that is presented here. While taking the words to be a smaller size and turning them upside down so that the viewer can still read them, but I make them less important.

I'm also planning on finding a nice box to put all of the poems in while wrapping it somehow, because I felt that each poem was special, and I wanted to treat them as letters of some sort.